African Rally. They are running on dirt road - if you can call what they're
driving on a road. They cross small rivers without bridges. Sometimes rain
has washed most of the road away. Lions and goats may cross the road. A goat
might not sound too threathening, but I assure you that wildlife on the road
is no fun. I have gone offroad twice because of reindeers deciding to use
the road (grew up in the northern part of Norway). And I was doing at
maximum half the speed of the rally drivers.
On other stages, there are spectators just inches from the road, sometimes
even on the road.
I do not understand why this kind of motorsport is allowed. It seems just
too dangerous. It probably is more dangerous than rush hour in Rome, Italy
<g>
These drivers drives under any condition: Dry tarmac, dirt, rain and snow.
There are no run off areas. Go off road, and you risk hitting a tree,
running off a cliff, hitting a lot of spectators etc. They do not drive as
fast as Nascar, Cart and F1 drivers, but who cares. They drive as fast as
they dare, and as fast as the circumstances allows them to do. If they drive
any faster than the latter, the risk of somebody getting injured is high.
Pit strategy is not very important when rallying. Just make sure that the
damage done to your car during race can be fixed within the pit time
available between the stages.
A rally sim would be fun even offline, as opposed to Nascar sims and F1
sims. In rally, you're competing primarily against yourself.
Online, a rally sim could separate the naturals like Greger Huttu from the
rest of us immediately. A random track generator would ensure that the
natural skills of the driver becomes more important than thousands and
thousands of hours of training to get just one turn right. You don't even
need a random track generator. All you need is some random surface condition
generator. Every track would be an equivalent of your first experience at
Nrburgring in GPL.
Hmmmm.... Why would I want a random track generator? I'm no natural. I need
insane hours of practise. A rally sim with a random track generator would
probably make me the Eldred Pickett of Rally Sims <g>
I tried the demo of Rally Trophy. It had the right "feel", but was
nevertheless too arcadish. You could go offroad without loosing too much
time, or getting too much damage. In fact, the damage model was only visual.
I don't know if this was fixed in the full game, 'cause I never found the
full game in the shops :-((
RC 2000 had potential. I found myself lifting off the throttle even on
straights, because the feel of speed was so intense - as it should be,
running at 100 mph. On the other hand, I was a little dissappoited by the
huge amount of grip, even on gravel & snow, but I guess this is because a
rally car isn't an ordinary race car. Another issue was the lack of weight.
Maybe this too is a real feature of a rally car - it handles so much better
than a road car that you think it doesn't carry any weight at all? But I
don't think so. You feel the car's weight in GPL, even though these cars are
considerably lighter. GPL physics, and RC 2000 concept = Killer Combo.
Papy has the know how. We know that they are the number 1 physics modellers
around. They even know how to implement decent online capabilities. All they
have to do is to incorporate N4/N2002/GPL physics into a much more bumpy
road.
Sadly, Papy probably won't do this. Rally fans are too few. The biggest
market for game developers is the USA. How many citizens of USA knows about
rallying? I guess rallying is just as big in USA as baseball is in Europe
:-(
Jon Andersen,
GPL ***, in spite of preferring rallying